Beyond Tolerance

Easter 5    April 24, 2016      Community Christian Church of Springfield

Roger Ray, pastor               “Beyond Tolerance”  

John 13:34           I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

The Chamber of Commerce in Springfield, as it is in most cities, is comprised of business owners, employers, and sales people who band together to foster a successful business environment. About 20 years ago the Chamber asked their members what they needed from the available labor pool that they were not finding.

What emerged out of that questionnaire was the most amazingly blind program that reeked of classism and entitlement thinking that could only happen in a truly economically tiered society.  What these employers said that they needed was more depth of character out of their employees.  So the Chamber came up with a list of 12 qualities that they wanted to partner with the school system to teach in a Character Education program.

The proposal read like a wish list of slave owners describing what they wanted from their slaves.  The twelve character strengths the employers wanted included things like “attitude” which meant they wanted their employees to be cheerful and friendly at work, in spite of their miserable working conditions, low salaries, and tedious jobs. They wanted them to be “dependable” which meant that they wanted them to show up for work on time, ready to work, and to be willing to passively cooperate with erratic work schedules like when a fast food manager wants employees to come in and work for two hours during the lunch rush, then clock out and sit around for three hours, and then come back and click in for two more hours in the dinner rush. 

And they wanted their work force to be loyal, that is, to praise their masters even when to do so required fundamental dishonesty.  But they also but honesty on their wish list but they interpreted that as being not stealing from their employer even when many employers steal from their employees by making them work off the clock several hours a week.

So, I was still a fairly young pastor who was new to the community and the president of the Chamber of Commerce was a member of my church board and was in charge of personnel…. Which, in that church, meant that he personally set my salary and benefits package based on just how “loyal” I was to him.

I am somewhat ashamed to admit that it took me nearly two years to convince this moral monster to join the Presbyterian Church down the street but what came out of this absurd slave-owners-teaching-slaves how to be sing and dance while they worked “character ed” program was the fact that a large coalition of local churches rose up and objected in loud protest, something that almost never happens.

But before you start to applaud let me quickly tell you what united the church community against the Chamber of Commerce. It was the inclusion of the word “tolerance,” which several of our local churches thought could be used as a code word for tolerance of homosexuality and they were not going to just stand idly by and allow the Chamber of Commerce to teach children not to be prejudiced.

I was offended by the Chamber’s assumption that the biggest problem with our classed society and violent wage disparity was that the poor refused to whistle while they worked but for my religious peers to hold press conferences and write newspaper editorials decrying tolerance as a character value was an outrage.

In both the newspaper and from the elevated pulpit of the big denominational church where I worked, I thundered against the churches that demanded that the world tolerance be removed from the list. As usual, in such fights, I did lose and they won. The Chamber and the school system agreed to remove tolerance from the list and they added courtesy…. Because we southerners know how to mask prejudice and hated a touch of courtesy and a syrupy “well bless their hearts.”

In the midst of my campaign to keep tolerance on the list … a list whose very existence I had protested and found to be morally repugnant…. Folks, this job gets complicated sometimes…. A elderly retired minister in my church came by the door on his way out of church and in place of the usual innocuous “good sermon pastor” handshake, he raised his finger to my face and said, “Tolerance is not a religious value. Tolerance is just a weak and meaningless thing. Love is a religious value.”

Prophets almost never like to be corrected, especially when engaged in full-on moral outrage. But this was one correction that has stuck with me through the years.

We don’t typically think of tolerance as a noble character virtue. 

We may say of a couple who have stayed married for decades in a conflict riddled marriage that “they barely tolerate one another.” None of you, if you looked into your beloved’s eyes and said, “I love you” would be satisfied if they replied, “And I tolerate you.” Tolerance is better than open warfare but it isn’t much of a goal.

Let me ask you this, I don’t want to see a show of hands but for those you who are here and those of you listening on the internet, do you personally know someone who has had an abortion? A lot of you, especially a lot of you are members of a traditional religious family will think that you do not know someone who has had an abortion.

But let me tell you, there are between one million and one and a half million abortions in the United States every year. Since only women of childbearing years get abortions, that narrows the field considerably and when you stretch that out over the decades since Roe v Wade, it is likely that somewhere around one in three women have had an abortion. So, folks, if you know as many as three women, you know someone who has had an abortion.

Based on my experience, a whole lot of those women want to discuss the decision both before and after having an abortion with people they know will not judge them…People who will listen empathetically to them. That is to say, they want to talk to someone who they believe will love them and not just tolerate them.

My phone rang one afternoon and the woman on the other end of the line was crying and was clearly barely holding herself together.

Over the years, it has not been uncommon for women to talk to me about this important decision but this phone call was different. It wasn’t from a member of the church. The call came from one of our YouTube listeners who lives a thousand miles away…. Someone I had never met, never corresponded with, and would never meet.

I’m glad that she felt that she could trust me after having listened to my sermons for several months but I had to ask…. Can you not talk to your pastor, your school counselor, your parents…. Isn’t there someone in your life that you believe loves you enough to talk to you about this?  And I get that sometimes you want anonymity at a moment like this and I was certainly a safe choice for an anonymous confidant, but as the father of a daughter who is of child bearing age, it kinda made me want to track down her father and slap him until his teeth rattled.

Because, fathers, your daughters should instinctively know, they should be confident beyond any shadow of doubt, that in their darkest moments of life that you are their hero, that you are in their corner, and when no one else can be trusted that you can be trusted to love them without fail.

And this is something that you cannot tell them and convince them of at the last minute. They already know by the way you have talked to them at the dinner table, how you read to them at night when they were going to sleep… they know from how you packed their lunch for school and cleaned the gravel out of their skinned knees whether you are tolerant or whether you are loving.

Our little church meets in a rebuilt and repurposed building that for 40 years was a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall. For forty years, people sat in this room and were taught that if any member of their family, whether it is your mother, or your daughter, if they left the Jehovah’s Witnesses to either go to another church or to no church at all, that you were not to speak to them, associate with them, have meals with them, or in any way show approval of them.

That’s extreme, but over the years we’ve had any number of former Catholic and Assemblies of God members who kept the fact that they were coming here a secret from members of their family because it would have caused conflict in their family.

And yet, we want Palestinians and Israelis to get along peacefully. We want most of the Middle East to forget about a century of colonial exploitation by the west and just sell us their natural resources at a price where we can take all of the profit. Tolerance will not create the world we want to live in. Tolerance is not enough.

I have talked about marriage and family relationships so far, and we started today with this very nice verse from the gospel of John in which Jesus tells his disciples to love one another… that in fact, the definition of what it means to be a Christian is the evidence of genuine affection for one another.

That’s a nice thought…. It doesn’t describe a lot of what most of us have experienced from church, but even that is not at the crux of the matter.

When the Jesus seminar scholars looked at the gospels with a critical eye, trying to made an educated guess as to which of the teachings found there actually originated with Jesus and which were a product of the later church that were added later to the Jesus narrative, the one line that virtually all of the scholars could agree on was a teaching that was so radical, so unique, that they agreed that it not only originated with Jesus but it may have been the teaching that made him stand out in the first place.

That is a line that is found in the 5^th chapter of Matthew and in the 6^th chapter of Luke where Jesus says, “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you…bless those who curse you.”

Man, that’s hard. It is nearly impossible. I think it is safe to say that on one does it all of the time…the bigger question would be, does anyone do it, ever?

In a recent TED Talk, Palestinian born Aziz Abu Sarah talked about his journey from hate to love. Aziz grew up in a West Bank neighborhood where every morning, when his mother packed his lunch, she made sure that she put a whole onion in his lunch bag. The onion was not for Aziz to eat, it was to use in case Israeli soldiers fired tear gas in the streets where he was walking to school. Palestinian mothers believe that if you cut an onion in two and hold it up to your face, it will help you to cry out the tear gas and it will keep you from being overwhelmed by the gas.

Now, I have no idea whether that technique works, I suspect that it doesn’t, but the fact that his mother had to think about such things is what should help us to get out of our own heads for a minute and imagine what it must be like to grow up in a conflict zone. Aziz talks about how his older brother was arrested by the Israeli police on suspicion of having thrown rocks at Israeli soldiers. He never confessed to the crime but his interrogators literally beat him to death trying to get a confession out of him.

This early childhood trauma wounded Aziz deeply, it hurt him and made him so angry that he did become a violent protestor against the Jewish occupiers of his land. But at some point, he decided to try to understand his oppressors. He visited the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. He studied the history of his enemy’s pain. He even began to study Hebrew and the Jewish faith, not to convert but to understand.

Through studying the people who had taken his land and had murdered his brother, he found that he could empathize… not to ignore their offenses against Palestinians but to realize that the cycle of retribution would, as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “An eye for an eye will eventually make all of us blind.”

Aziz and a couple of Jewish partners now run a tourism business in Israel, sending both a Jewish and a Muslim guide with each group, to give both perspectives on their land’s history and conflict. They take Muslims to celebrate Friday night Sabbath meals in the homes of Jews and they take Jews to Friday prayers in Mosques in the hopes that mutual understanding can lead beyond simple cease-fire and tolerance, towards real friendship and love.

St Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Imitation of Christ that to fully understand another person is to entirely forgive them.  Folks, I think that is true. Our talk about love in religious communities needs to be more than esoteric verbiage. It can’t be just an ideal placed so far beyond us that we never even really try.

John records Jesus saying that we should love one another… that seems like a good idea and we should try it more often. Matthew and Luke record Jesus rolling up his sleeves and getting real with us…. You should love your enemies… and that is hard stuff. It doesn’t happen naturally or easily and I think the only way to get there is to understand them… and that takes time and effort and it means that you have to take people seriously even when what they believe and how they think seems totally ridiculous and entirely wrong to you. You don’t have to agree to understand.

You need to be the kind of mother that your son will never have to wonder if you will still love him if he tells you that he is gay. You need to be the kind of father whose daughter will know that you will be her strongest supporter, no matter how she may have messed up.  You need to be the kind of Democrat who can patiently listen to a Republican neighbor and them calmly explain to them why they are wrong. … I didn’t tell you that I had this all worked out yet, but I think you know where I’m going with this. Good luck.

Søren Kierkegaard:  Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.